I’ve been coaching yoga teachers on their businesses since 2016, and in that time I’ve worked with more than 1,500 of them. I’ve watched people build businesses from scratch, seen what works, seen what doesn’t, and seen a lot of really talented teachers spend years in the same frustrating place without understanding why.

One of the questions I get asked most often, in different forms, is: what would you do if you were me? Where would you start, what would you focus on, what would you skip?

This is my honest answer — not a perfect plan, not a framework with seven steps, just my genuine perspective on what I’d prioritize knowing everything I know now.

Get known for something specific

The first thing I’d do, and I’d do it from day one, is decide what I want to be known for.

Not “yoga teacher.” That’s not specific enough anymore. There are hundreds of thousands of yoga teachers online, and most of them are teaching the same styles, talking about the same things, posting the same kinds of content. If someone lands on your Instagram or your website and all they see is “yoga teacher helping people find peace and balance,” there’s nothing there that makes them stay. There’s nothing that makes them think, this person is for me specifically.

What I’d do instead is think carefully about the intersection between what I’m genuinely good at, what I find interesting, and what a specific group of people actually needs. Maybe that’s yoga for women going through perimenopause. Maybe it’s a specific methodology developed after years of practice. Maybe it’s the way you combine yoga with something else entirely — breathwork, nervous system regulation, something that feels uniquely yours. Whatever it is, building your whole presence around that thing is far more powerful than trying to be a yoga teacher for everyone.

Now, I know that when you’re just getting started, this can feel really hard. Like you’re supposed to have it all figured out before you even begin. But actually, the beginning is the perfect time to experiment, because you’re not locked into anything yet. You have the freedom to try different things, pay attention to what resonates, notice which topics make you come alive when you talk about them and which ones feel like a chore. Your niche often reveals itself through that process rather than through sitting down and thinking your way to the perfect answer. So I wouldn’t wait until I felt completely certain before putting myself out there. I’d start, pay attention, and let the focus sharpen over time.

Build an audience I actually own

Alongside getting known for something specific, I’d focus early on building an audience that actually belongs to me.

I’d be on social media, of course. That’s where people discover you, and it matters. But I’d treat social media as a way to bring people into something I control, not as the destination itself. The reality of social platforms is that they change their algorithms constantly, they can reduce your reach overnight, and what works today doesn’t always work a year from now. You’re building on borrowed land. The audience you build there isn’t really yours.

Your email list is yours. And I’d start building it from day one, even if it’s just a spreadsheet with twenty names on it. Even if the only people on it at first are students from the studio where you teach, people who’ve taken a workshop with you, friends who’ve expressed interest in what you’re doing. You write to them regularly, you share what you’re thinking about, you give them something useful, and slowly that list becomes one of the most valuable things in your business.

Every yoga teacher I’ve worked with who has built something genuinely sustainable has this. They have an email list they’ve been nurturing for years, and when they launch something, they have a warm, engaged audience to launch to. The ones who skip this step spend a lot of time wondering why their launches feel so hard.

Build my offer suite sooner than feels comfortable

This is the one that surprises most people, but I’d think about my offers much earlier than most yoga teachers think is appropriate.

Here’s what I see happen over and over again. A teacher starts teaching classes — in a studio, online, maybe a drop-in Zoom class or a recorded library somewhere. They work hard, they build a following slowly, and then they wonder why the income is so inconsistent, or why they’re always chasing the next student, or why they can’t seem to get above a certain level no matter how much they teach.

The answer, almost always, is the offer structure. Not the quality of the teaching. The structure.

There’s a ceiling on what you can earn from classes and drop-in sessions, because you’re trading your time directly for money and you can only teach so many classes. And on top of that, there’s so much free yoga content available online now — YouTube alone has more yoga videos than anyone could ever watch — that trying to compete on price or accessibility just doesn’t work. The question becomes: what can you offer that YouTube can’t?

The answer is transformation. A real, supported journey with you as the guide, not just access to content.

So what I’d build, much sooner than feels comfortable, is a premium transformational offer. And I don’t necessarily mean a group program, although that’s one option. It could be a private yoga package built around a specific outcome — not ten sessions of yoga, but a twelve-week journey to do something specific that your client deeply wants. It could be a coaching package if you have the expertise to support people beyond just the physical practice. The format matters less than the positioning. The question is: are you selling a collection of sessions, or are you selling a transformation? Because those two things are priced completely differently and they attract completely different clients.

I’d also pair that premium offer with a low-ticket entry point — something accessible that lets people experience working with me before they’re ready to invest at a higher level. Not because a low-ticket offer will make me rich on its own, but because it creates a natural journey. Someone finds you, buys something small, gets a result, trusts you, and when you invite them into something bigger, they’re already a step ahead.

What I wouldn’t do is build a low-priced membership hoping that volume will eventually make the numbers work. It usually doesn’t, and it tends to keep you stuck in a model where you’re working harder and harder for income that doesn’t really grow.

Stop waiting until I feel ready

The last thing I’d do differently is stop waiting for some future version of myself to feel qualified enough to charge more and ask for more.

This is something I see so often, and it breaks my heart a little. A teacher who has genuinely helped dozens of people, who has real expertise, who has something valuable to offer — and she’s still charging the same rates she charged when she first started because somewhere along the way she absorbed the belief that she needs more experience, more credentials, more followers before she’s allowed to step into a more premium positioning.

I understand where that comes from. Yoga culture has a complicated relationship with money. There’s this quiet idea that if you really care about the practice, the business side of things shouldn’t matter too much. That wanting to earn well is somehow at odds with being authentic or service-oriented. But I’ve spent years watching what happens when yoga teachers stay small financially, and it doesn’t serve them or their students. You can’t sustain a business, you can’t invest in getting better, you can’t serve your clients well when you’re constantly worried about money.

Summary

So I’d build toward a premium offer sooner, charge what the transformation is actually worth, and get some support in doing it — because almost nobody figures this part out alone. The teachers I’ve watched make the biggest leaps almost always had someone in their corner helping them see their own value more clearly.

None of this is complicated in theory. The hard part is the doing — making the decisions, building the structures, actually putting it out into the world when it would be so much easier to just keep teaching your classes and hoping something shifts on its own.

But above everything else, here’s what I’d want to hold onto. Stay in your own lane. Trust what you know. Don’t give your power away to every new strategy or trend or voice that tells you you’re doing it wrong. You got into this work because you have something real to offer, and the business you’re building is just the container that lets you offer it to more people, more sustainably, for longer. That’s worth taking seriously. That’s worth building properly.